Faith

For the past few months I’ve been working with a career coach named Steve. “Career coach” is a technically accurate title for what he is in relation to me, but it does a really crappy job of capturing the bigness and importance of what it feels like we’ve been working on together. I was introduced to Steve early last spring. I thought for a little while my agency might partner with his company, which specializes in high performance sales training. But a whole host of changes on our side made it clear by mid-summer that there was basically zero chance of that happening. We stayed in touch sporadically, an occasional monthly email here and there to check in, but I assumed it would eventually dissolve as so many professional connections do – ‘so nice to meet you, I really like the way you think, let’s absolutely stay in touch because it would be awesome to partner together someday’…and two or three years later we’ve each become a name in the other’s LinkedIn Connections inventory that sounds vaguely familiar, but that neither of us can quite place.

But it just so happens that one of those occasional check-ins Steve sent me came the second week of November last year. A couple days after a couple areas of my life fell apart. His email conceded that a formal agency engagement probably didn’t make sense at the moment, but if I was ever interested in personal coaching I should give him a call any time. The email’s content was gracious and its tone read like a goodbye. The next day I wrote back and said we should talk about it. He suggested we meet for lunch around the corner from my office. I remember him walking up the steps of The Merchant, smiling when he spotted me in the corner, coming over to the table with a hearty, “It’s been too long. So how have you been doing?” Which was all it took to make me burst into tears.

“How was I doing?” Friends and family had been calling non-stop for days to check in and ask. He was the first person I answered honestly. I remember telling him about how hard I’d worked at the relationship I was in and on the projects I was trying to save. I knew each was a mess. I’d studied each of them inside and out. I knew what I was dealing with and I knew I could fix them. I made a plan for each of them. I executed the shit out of those plans. And…it didn’t work. None of it worked. For the first time ever, I couldn’t do it. I remember telling him that I’d never felt so lost. I remember looking at him, this person I’d spent less than four non-continuous hours with, and saying something I’m not sure I’ve ever given anybody as a final answer: “I don’t know what to do.”

I remember Steve listening intently the whole time and not breaking eye contact. Not even the three times the waitress came over to us and pulled back without asking us for our order because – yup – we were gonna be that table. Steve pulled out a pen from his bag and held the tip of it against the corner of the relatively large circular table we were sitting at. I won’t do his words justice, but his point was this: we all go through life thinking that, by and large, we’re making good, well-reasoned, rational decisions. We’ve taken in all the facts. We’ve got a good sense of our surroundings. So we make choices and we go – and we’re absolutely shocked each time things don’t work out the way we planned. Because all the facts and context and rationale we use to convince ourselves that we know what we’re doing, and how it will all turn out, are contained in the tip of a ballpoint pen. The problem being that the world around us is the table. And all that surface area that the tip of the pen doesn’t cover – we can’t see it. But that massive, un-seeable world and all its forces are aiding, negating, and upending our well-reasoned plans every minute of every day.

At this point the look on my face probably indicated that he needed to say something positive to me. And he did. He talked about the importance of faith. Steve is religious. He believes in God and that’s where his faith comes from. But he was clear that religious belief is not what he means by faith, and you don’t need the former to have the latter. Faith, he said, means believing in the butterfly effect. It’s knowing that if you put something out into the world – any meager action, any small gesture – that it will move something. In the earth. On the water. In the air. It travels. It nudges something or someone else. Something happens that wouldn’t have otherwise. Then that thing’s ripples spread. And eventually, at some point in time and in some form, that action you put out into the world comes back to you and changes you in ways you never could have planned for. When you find yourself in a moment or situation that feels like the end of the road, it’s okay if you don’t have a plan for what to do next. It’s okay if you have no idea where to start. But the one thing you can’t do is lose faith.

Steve made me think of a memory that I hadn’t thought about in almost twenty years. I was twelve years old and I had a gymnastics meet up in Maine. My mom was away on vacation that weekend with her sister – I think it was the only time during my entire childhood that my mom was ever away for an entire weekend. My brother and sister were at home with a babysitter and my dad and I were doing a long day trip up and back so that I could compete, but we’d get home before my brother and sister went to bed. The meet was one of those absolutely perfect days in childhood athletics – everything went right. My floor routine was the best one I’d ever done. I got on the medal stand for uneven bars, which was effing unheard of. And I won the all-around – for the first and only time in my gymnastics career. I walked over to the stands to meet my dad afterward, laden with medals and a trophy. He gave me a huge hug and told me he was proud of me. We said goodbye to my teammates and their parents – it was already dinnertime and they were planning to stay up in Maine at a nearby hotel overnight – and we walked out to the parking lot.

It was only then that we realized it had been snowing for several hours and it was still coming down hard (like most gymnastics venues of my childhood, the oversized garage space we were in was high on square footage, low on windows). I remember a concerned look on my dad’s face. I remember wanting to stay in the hotel with an indoor pool that my friends were all going back to. But my brother and sister were home with a teenage babysitter who’d never taken care of little kids overnight. We had to get home.

We drove slowly. I turned on my Counting Crows CD, like I always did, but my dad shut it off after a couple songs so that he could concentrate. We turned onto the ramp for 95 South with thick flakes falling all around us and saw that someone – maybe highway patrol, maybe state police – had put up a cone barrier designed to block anyone from getting on the highway. My dad got out of the car and moved the cones. We drove slowly up the ramp and got onto the highway. We were the only ones on the road. I remember the car skidding once, and my dad got it righted. Then it skidded again. We were going at a crawl so the impact wasn’t jarring. But there was still a loud thud as the car slid into the guard rail, now invisible under the snow. We were off the road and we were stuck.

I remember my dad talking to me in low, even tones to keep me calm. I remember him praying – which made me scared. I remember knowing that those cones had meant the highway was closed. There wasn’t going to be anyone else coming. I don’t remember how long we sat there with the heat on, my dad talking to me, then praying. Maybe fifteen minutes. Maybe an hour. Maybe more. But I remember the moment we both saw headlights behind us, approaching slowly in the middle of the road. My dad got out of the car and waved his arms, and a beatup red truck pulled up beside us. The driver was a young guy – blonde hair and blue eyes. He got out and helped my dad push our Ford Taurus out of the breakdown lane and back out into the road. He said he was from around there and had us follow him to the next exit and guided us to a motel a mile or so from the highway. He got out of his truck once we were in the parking lot and my dad thanked him profusely and offered him all the money in his wallet. The guy wouldn’t take it. He said he was glad we were safe. My dad got his legal pad and pen out of his briefcase and asked the guy for his name and address so we could send him a card. I remember the driver writing, standing under the dim lights of the motel vacancy sign, snow still falling all around us. My dad shook his hand and got me inside the lobby out of the cold. He showed me the legal pad when we got into our room – Gabriel. Our savior’s name was Gabriel.

My dad and I ate Sunny Doodles from the motel vending machine for dinner, fell asleep, and drove home in the morning. The babysitter did great and Billy and Abby were fine. My dad and I were fine. We all agreed we should probably never tell my mother. My dad sent a card and a check to Gabriel first thing Monday, made out to match the details written in childish, loopy handwriting on the legal pad. It was returned at the end of the week – the post office had no such person or address on record.

Faith. For me, lately, it’s been hard to come by. Last year I put my faith in the wrong person. This year started in New Zealand where on every mountaintop I could smell smoke because Australia was burning. In February I got off to what felt like a running start in Seattle, only to be turned around in March by a global pandemic. April and May were spent on lockdown. Minneapolis is burning.

This weekend I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about faith. I realized I didn’t actually know what it meant, so I looked up the definition this morning: 1. Confidence or trust in a person or thing. 2. Belief that is not based on proof.

I thought about my dad. He’s someone I’ve looked up to my whole life because of his faith – it’s unshakable. It’s an unbelievable thing to see. He’s someone who always does the right thing. He always puts other people first. He’s unfailingly honest no matter what. He’s someone who has always put goodness and kindness and generosity out into the world. And in the one moment he needed it, it came back to him. I thought about my friend who’s like my sister, who’s letting me crash her place on the Cape when I need an escape from the city. I thought about my two dear friends in Eastie who’ve become my quarantine family. I thought about Steve – someone who’s worked with me to build out a detailed picture of my ideal future self in 20 years. I’ll be 58. An age that has particular resonance with me in this moment. He’s helping me come up with a plan for how to get there that has nothing to do with job skills or promotions and everything to do with outlook, values, and courage. He won’t take a penny for it.

I would never have met him if I hadn’t been in that relationship last year.

And to me, he’s the ultimate reminder that definition #1 comes from definition #2. There was no proof that anything positive was going to come from the choices I made in 2019. In fact, all proof seemed to point to the opposite. But Steve gives me faith. That there’s always good to be found and a door to be opened, even when you’re goddamn convinced you’ll never find your way through the darkness. He helps me believe there’s a reason my Seattle progress got detoured back to Boston. I’m rowing here. There are things about it that are super hard. But so many things about it that are wonderful. And the other day, Steve reminded me that the water of the Charles isn’t a pond or a lake – it’s a river. Which means the water I rowed on today isn’t the same water I rowed on last fall or even yesterday. Tomorrow the water will be new. And I’ll be on it, learning to feel better in the place that will always be home. Which is the place that, in the end, needs to feel better than anywhere else in the world.

And the most important thing of all is to keep the faith that – if I put the right actions and effort and commitment to change out there – it will.